Didier Acouetey : “Advocacy needs to continue”
Launched in 2014, the Africa SME Champions Forum aims to shift the balance in favor of African SMEs. According to the IMF, Africa needs to create 20 million jobs a year for the next twenty years. These jobs will be created by SMEs. How can we support their growth to meet the employment challenge, reduce poverty and ultimately contribute to the continent's development? That's the question we've been trying to answer for a decade with the Africa SME Champions Forum.
By Didier Acouetey, Chairman of AfricSearch and founder of the Africa SME Champions Forum
As this eighth edition of the Africa SME Champions Forum draws to a close, we feel a sense of urgency about the actions that need to be taken to support SMEs. This urgency was at the heart of our approach when we launched the Forum almost 10 years ago.
Our desire to provide concrete solutions for Africa’s transformation and job creation goes back to our community activism days in the early 1990s.
When I turned my attention to human resources, it was clear to me how central the issue of human capital was to the development of the continent. It really is our DNA. Statistics show that it’s small and medium-sized enterprises that create jobs. Bosses toil for years, hire 2, 5, 8 people, then 50, 100… That’s the normal cycle of entrepreneurship. But these entrepreneurs don’t get enough support. The social crisis, combined with bad governance and the lack of jobs for young people in recent years, should lead to the kind of explosion we’re seeing now. In the Sahel in particular, the lack of prospects for young people is exacerbating this crisis. The drama that we saw coming because of the lack of wealth creation, some of which should come from the private sector and job creation, is beginning to take shape.
The drama we saw coming because of the lack of job creation for young people is taking shape
The question of support for entrepreneurs and SMEs has become central today. How can we mobilize the entire ecosystem for the benefit of SMEs to create a dynamic for the development of champions? We have all participated in numerous international conferences where, at the end of the day, 80 to 99% of the players who should be in the room – the entrepreneurs – were not there. Therefore, it was important to create a platform where decision-makers, entrepreneurs and financiers could come together to make the right decisions for SMEs.
The Africa SME Champions Forum is a unique event in Africa dedicated to SME growth. We know that we are facing a crisis of massive youth unemployment in Africa. And it is these SMEs that can create the thousands of jobs that our young people are missing. That’s why this forum was created to facilitate growth through three dimensions: access to finance, access to new markets and capacity building.
Barely 20% of SMEs have access to finance through traditional channels. But to grow a business you need resources. The idea of this forum is to bring together banks, international financial institutions, investment funds, business angels, venture funds, guarantee funds, etc., so that these different players can provide a holistic and combined response to the needs of SMEs.
You can’t neglect 80-90% of the wealth creators in a country. That explains the longevity of this event
You can’t neglect 80-90% of the wealth creators in an economy. That explains the longevity of this event. Everyone is aware of the need to provide answers for SMEs, even if the answers are largely incomplete. The various players may believe that this forum can bring about changes in the policies and instruments needed to develop SMEs. Some institutions have decided to make SMEs the mainstay of their activities, such as BADEA, which has been supporting us for several years with the African Guarantee Fund, Afreximbank and others. These are institutions that have understood that Africa’s development will be achieved through SMEs.
International institutions and governments need to adopt bolder policies and inject massive resources into their economies, targeting SMEs. Technical assistance also needs to be stepped up. Many SMEs have organizational problems. They need this technical assistance, often free of charge, to bring them up to standard, to recruit, to organize, to equip themselves with modern management tools, etc.
For us, this is a very important event for SMEs which, as we can’t say enough, are the heart and lungs of our economy
So, every year we try to mobilize a few more partners to find answers to the questions SMEs are asking. In ten years, a lot of progress has been made by international and especially African financial institutions and commercial banks, but more needs to be done. Advocacy needs to continue with the implementation of innovative policies in favor of SMEs to facilitate the emergence of champions and job creation.
